Posts Tagged ‘Paul Babeu’

Conservatives generally dislike and distrust the press. Most will say it’s because the press is biased against conservatives – that if you were to ask members of the media whom they voted for in the last three Presidential elections it would be Gore, Kerry and Obama.

However, if conservatives, who are more likely to cite the Founding Fathers in a political of philosophical debate, were consistent in their thinking, they would embrace the press as an important safeguard to liberty.

Instead, conservatives routinely bash the media, the “MSM”, the “left-wing rags” – hey, I’ve done it at times as well.

This whole line of thinking – the importance of a free press – got started when I was interviewed last week by Dave Biscobing, a young, aggressive reporter with ABC 15 in Phoenix. This is a guy who takes his job as a reporter seriously – he truly investigates, ask the tough questions and seeks the truth without bias.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is likely no fan of Biscobing, and my guess is that any public official who engages in questionable activities or puts their public trust at risk is going to get to know Dave. Having met him, I’m glad we have a free press to keep politicians honest.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu is under investigation for tampering with public records in the fall-out of allegations that he threatened his former boyfriend with deportation if their relationship became public.

As the Arizona Republic reports, emails that were requested by the paper related to Babeu were deleted. When questioned about the emails, the Pinal County Sheriff’s office claimed that it was a routine clean up of old emails and that they had been properly archived.

However, when the archives were searched it was discovered that more than 7,000 emails had been deleted.

While IT staff was conducting research before March 7, Behring’s e-mail says, they found a file on a drive that contained 7,220 documents, mostly e-mails. When they went back on March 7, that same file contained only 818 documents.

So, the emails in question were apparently deleted twice.

As we learned from Watergate, it’s usually not the initial act that causes political death, it’s the cover-up.

For a law enforcement officer to engage in his kind of cover-up is not only a violation of law, it’s a violation of he public trust.